The day was special for a couple of reasons, firstly it was a free event run during the student unions ‘Societies festival’ to try and attract new blood to the society and offer some free fun events. The other special reason was due to the event being supported by Digital Jesters and their brand new game “Savage : The Battle of Newerth”, they were kind enough to provide some free t-shirts and 2 copies of the full game for the winners of a tournament.

Out of interest Im not sure which of the above was responsible but we had a record turn out for this event, beating our previous best by a clear margin. Thanks to all 23 people for turning up!

WraithHammer was the first to appear and bring with him a number of extra machines for use by spectators and people who wandered down to the event for a look see. After some great fiddling we finally got them partially working :)

After the arrival of a number of other lanners we started the first game of the day, Savage surprisingly; everyone had seen the hype and was dieing to get in and see if it really was as good as people had said. I think everyones first impressions were that the game was extremely good and offered something a little different to the normal FPS games they are used to. You notice the differences straight away, when you begin you're presented with two options. One is well known to players of the online shoot em up...that's spawn. It's how you find yourself on the battlefield. The other option is quite new, it's the 'command' option. This one will throw you into a screen unfamiliar to all those who have never been near Command and Conquer or it's many variants. It's a top down map screen, with options to view the troops, research items or construct buildings.

That's right...Savage... allows you to play as a Real Time Strategy or a straight hack and slash.

You may think this is all a gimmick designed to set it apart from the competition, but after a long morning of addictive gameplay against the rest of the society, I can tell you it really isn't. The two modes actually work perfectly together, in great harmony, and even in just a few hours they both helped to give the game it's own unique characteristics. Those who felt they knew how to lead would take command, and then construct extra buildings to help make available more impressive weaponry, armour and character classes. Meanwhile, the rest of us would take on the job of the warriors. We could 'attack' gold mines to help gather resources (though there were also AI workers to carry this burden if you don't want to) and you can do the same to new buildings to construct them yourself. Meanwhile, you can go off and do what a warrior does best...attack!

This lead to some truly enthralling moments where both sides met at a bottleneck in the map, exactly halfway between the two bases. The commanders were ordering barracks (i.e. extra spawn points closer to the front lines) to be constructed around the clamouring of sword on sword, and the wakes of projectile weapons as we fought long and hard to maintain a hold on this bottleneck. Losing the hold would mean the enemy were left with numerous directions to pour in upon your base, so losing was not an option, and the battle was fought hard and fast.

After some games of our old favourites Battlefield 1942: Desert Combat and Delta Force:Black Hawk Down it was time to get on with the long awaited Savage tournament. After some initial messing about with numbers we finally had 4 teams ready to pit themselves in battle to win big prizes and eternal glory.

The first round had “A vs B” and “C vs D”. The victors from C vs D was quickly decided as C won by totally destroying the other teams base. The other game went on for substancially longer and was only decided on points after the full 1 hour, A coming out just on top. This left a tense battle to become No. 1 with Team A vs Team C, this was a thrilling game with very evenly matched teams and went right down to the wire with Team C pulling off the win at the end of the time limit. The losers game had Team B vs Team D, once again the LAN Cymru staff proved they aren’t actually gods on every game and managed to get totally whipped to come last of the last. So congratulations to Team C for becoming the Savage champs of LAN Cymru.

The winning team in all their glory! (Maart, Gibbon, Pharoh, BravoTek, ORT)

What people had to say about Savage:

Martin Williams - "Excellent teamwork game, quick to pickup, hard to master."
Nick Williams - "Not just an original game, but an original game executed well. Most impressed."
Andrew Settersfield - "This new idea of linking RTS with FPS works surprisingly well. Easy to pickup and looks great too."
Nick Gibbs - "Novel idea of linking strategy and FPS. Very comptetive, good team play, will definetly be buying a copy."

The evening saw the new addition of Call of Duty and some old school UT2k3. We weren’t quite done though, as we had an award ceremony for the winners of the Savage tournament when they all received their free t-shirts and got to fight over the 2 copies of the full game. We finished the night off with a free raffle to give away the remaining Savage t-shirts.

Another LAN over and another damn good day, nice to see lots of new faces and the playing of a number of new games. The next event will be in March and no doubt will see some more Savage and hopefully the UT2k4 demo once it arrives!!

Once again thanks to all attended, next time must see more Desert Combat so I can reign more helicopter death upon you all!!!

[ A full set of photos from the event can be found here. ]